vement in the branches of a fir a little beyond them. Then his quick
eye, keener in discrimination than that of any wolf, detected the
sturdy figure of a large wolverene making its way from tree to tree at
a safe distance above the snow, intent upon the wolves. What one
carcajou--"Glutton," he called it--could hope, for all its cunning, to
accomplish against five big timber-wolves, he could not imagine.
Hating the "Glutton," as all trappers do, he wished most earnestly
that it might slip on its branch and fall down before the fangs of the
pack.

There was no smallest danger of the wary carcajou doing anything of
the sort. Every faculty was on the alert to avenge herself on the
wolves who had robbed her of her destined prey. Most of the other
creatures of the wild she despised, but the wolves she also hated,
because she felt herself constrained to yield them way. She crawled
carefully from tree to tree, till at last she gained one whose lower
branches spread directly over the carcass of the moose. Creeping
out upon one of those branches, she glared down maliciously upon
her foes. Observing her, two of the wolves desisted long enough from
their feasting to leap up at her with fiercely gnashing teeth. But
finding her out of reach, and scornfully unmoved by their futile
demonstrations, they gave it up and fell again to their ravenous
feasting.

The wolverene is a big cousin to the weasel, and also to the skunk.
The ferocity of the weasel it shares, and the weasel's dauntless
courage. Its kinship to the skunk is attested by the possession of a
gland which secretes an oil of peculiarly potent malodour. The smell
of this oil is not so overpowering, so pungently strangulating, as
that emitted by the skunk; but all the wild creatures find it
irresistibly disgusting. No matter how pinched and racked by famine
they may be, not one of them will touch a morsel of meat which a
wolverene has defiled ever so slightly. The wolverene itself, however,
by no means shares this general prejudice.

When the carcajou had glared down upon the wolves for several minutes,
she ejected the contents of her oil-gland all over the body of the
moose, impartially treating her foes to a portion of the nauseating
fluid. With coughing, and sneezing, and furious yelping, the wolves
bounded away, and began rolling and burrowing in the snow. They could
not rid themselves at once of the dreadful odour; but, presently
recovering their self-possession, and r